Thursday, June 9, 2016

What's the barrier to universal basic income?

"Speaking to Business Insider in late May, Bregman - whose book
Utopia for Realists explores realistic ways of putting
into place ideas like UBI and working for just 15 hours per week
- said that before there's a real chance of a basic income being
accepted worldwide, there needs to be a paradigm shift in the way
we think about the concept of work, what we define as work, and
why we pay for some types of work but not
others.

'The most important obstacle for
basic income is a moral obstacle, it is in the ideas that we
still have about work. We still work with a very outdated
definition of what work is. We define work by getting a salary in
a hierarchical relationship with an employer, and you have to get
paid.'All the other things, caring for
the children, caring for the elderly, doing housework and
volunteer work - we don't consider that as work, even though
obviously it is. Try and
stop doing those things, go on strike as a careworker
or stop doing the dishes and
you'll see that it is going to be a problem.'"

I'm still thinking this will happen, though probably not in my lifetime.